Pierson, a Marine combat veteran, had been riding his motorcycle
near Alpine when another motorist called to complain about a biker passing a
number of slow-moving motor homes. Pierson was not charged with a traffic
violation or a criminal offense -- but he was arrested and detained in
handcuffs for 45 minutes because the sight of a Mundane carrying a firearm
caused Bassett to irrigate his underwear.

“I know you have a gun,” Bassett said a few seconds into the
stop, which was recorded
on Pierson’s cell phone. “Are you a cop?”

When Pierson indicated that he was not part of the armed
revenue-extracting caste, Bassett muttered: “OK, what I’m going to do is – put your
hands behind your back right now.”

As he handcuffed the compliant motorist, Bassett explained, “I
don’t like someone with a gun,” while insisting, “You’re not under arrest.”

The second statement is an unalloyed lie: Whenever a police
officer restrains someone, that person is under arrest. The first statement is
a lie by omission: If Pierson had been a police officer, Bassett would not have
complained about him carrying a gun. The category of “someone” thus applies
only to Mundanes, whose very existence is seen as a threat to the unimaginably
precious personages who wear state-issued costumes.

“It’s the first thing you should have told me, [that] you’ve
got a gun,” simpered Bassett, whose panic-tinged voice was thrown into sharp
relief by Pierson’s composure.

“Well, actually I’m not required to tell you in either Idaho
or Wyoming,” Pierson correctly pointed out.

“Yes, you are,” insisted Bassett. “If you’re packing a gun,
I want to know about it.”

“Well, I’m open-carrying,” Pierson observed, stating the
obvious. As Bassett began a rote speech describing the sacred imperative of “officer
safety,” Pierson pointed out that he had done nothing wrong or illegal, that
the deputy’s safety “is not in any way in jeopardy," and that actually “it’s not
my concern.”

“It is!” yelped Bassett. “It’s my concern!”

“My only concern is my personal rights and individual
liberties, which you are violating right now,” noted Pierson.

“I handcuffed you for [sic] number one, you did not tell me
you had a gun on you, ‘kay?” Bassett groused. “You do not get off your bike and
face me, and I see a weapon on you! I don’t like that!”

“You asked me if I could get off my bike, and you said `yes,’”
recounted Pierson.

“I
understand your concerns about search and seizure, but you have to understand
one thing about where we’re at in law enforcement,” stated Bassett. “I’m asking
you for my safety. I don’t know you. I don’t know your intentions.”

The
same could have been said by Pierson about Bassett, who was, after all, just
another armed stranger. One critical difference, of course, is that Pierson knew that Bassett’s intentions were
malign: After all, the deputy had detained him, which is an act of aggression
by any definition.

Recall
that when Bassett noted that Pierson had a gun, his first question was: “Are
you a cop?” If Pierson had been a fellow member of the Brotherhood of Official
Plunder, this would have allayed Bassett’s concerns.

In
fact, after noticing that Pierson carried a military ID, Bassett suggested that
the detainee should see the encounter in terms of “force security” in a battle
zone.

“You’re
in the military,” Bassett began. “You ever been shot at? Would you like, if you
roll up on somebody you have no idea who they are … wouldn’t it be a question
in your mind if this person’s got weapons on them?”

Bassett,
who never served in the military, clearly saw himself as part of an army of
occupation – and insisted on unqualified submission to his supposed authority.

“Your
safety does not trump my right and my liberty,” Pierson tutored the deputy.

“When
I stop you, yes it does,” asserted Bassett.

“Your
personal safety is more important than all the laws, the Constitution, and every one of my
personal rights and liberties,” summarized Pierson, his voice heavy with
disgusted incredulity.

“When
I’m in a traffic stop, yes,” declared Bassett. “I’m in control of this
situation.”

“The
Constitution is in control of this situation,” Pierson rejoined.

“No
– I am… and if I feel that I’m going to be threatened by the fact that you have
a gun on your side, by hell I’m gonna do it,” concluded Bassett.

Forty-five
minutes later, Deputy Rob Andazola arrived to provide “backup.” At that point, as
Bassett has admitted in a sworn deposition, the deputies offered to unshackle
Pierson if he allowed Andazola to draw his weapon and shoot the motorcyclist in the event he made any gesture perceived as a “threat.”

Pierson
didn’t agree to those terms. Eventually a patrol supervisor reached the scene
and acknowledged that the motorcyclist had done nothing wrong. Until that
happened, however, Pierson was handcuffed, disarmed, and entirely at the mercy
of two armed strangers who considered it their right – if not their duty – to kill
him if he displayed any behavior that made them uneasy.

“I
didn’t know whether kicking my leg over the bike, or walking away, or what they
could possibly constitute as a hostile act,” Pierson
told the Associated Press. “And I was a little unnerved by the fact that
they were threatening lethal force with a deadly weapon against a man who was
compliant, in handcuffs, who had been screened.”

In
the sacred cause of “officer safety,” no precaution is excessive, no imposition
unjustified – and no constitutional “guarantee” of individual rights is
binding.

Pierson’s
legitimate concern for citizen safety in the presence of police is underscored
by an incident that occurred near Canton, Ohio just weeks before the traffic
stop in Wyoming.

“As soon as I felt
your gun I should have took [sic] two steps back, pulled my Glock 40 and just
put 10 bullets in your ass and let you drop,” ranted Harless. “And I wouldn’t
have lost any sleep.”

After threatening to
“put lumps on” a witness to the incident, Harless told Bartlett, “I’m so close
to caving in your f*****g head…. You’re just a stupid human being…. F*****g
talking to me with a f*****g gun. You want me to pull mine and stick it to your
head?”

Unlike Harless, who was obviously deranged, Bassett and
Andazola did not dissolve into puddles of psychotic rage. But lurking behind their
veneer of “professionalism” was a willingness to commit homicide simply because
the sight of a Mundane with a firearm made them feel kind of funny.

When contacted by Pro Libertate to comment on the case,
Captain John Steztenbach of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office explained that “Our
lawyer has told us that we are to say absolutely nothing about this case. I would
love nothing more that for the other side of the story to be told, and we’re
very frustrated that we can’t tell it, but it’s been made clear that until this
goes to court, we’re not to comment on any aspect of this case.”

Stetzenbach, a courteous and well-spoken Connecticut native,
explained that the gag order applies not only to the details of Pierson’s
arrest, but also to any discussion of the department’s instructions and
guidelines dealing with matters of “officer safety.” After describing how he
had come to the Rocky Mountain West to study at a gunsmith trade school in
Colorado, Stetzenbach proclaimed that both he and the department he serves are “very
pro-Second Amendment,” and promised that when the legal issues are settled he
will be very eager to “tell the whole story.”

What about "citizen safety"? Deranged Fed threatens to murder acitizen over a protest sign.

“It always amazes me how in situations like this, one side
gets out very quickly, and it’s not ours; that’s really frustrating,” Stetzenbach
complained.

In this case – as in other “situations” of its kind – the
officers have themselves to blame for the fact that the public hasn’t seen “their
side” of the story, since the dashcam recordings of the encounter have
mysteriously disappeared.

The victim documented the incident, and the chief assailant
has confirmed all of the victim’s key assertions. Res ipsa loquitir.

In his sworn deposition (as paraphrased by the AP), Bassett
admitted that he had been “trained to put his personal safety above the rights
of a citizen openly carrying a handgun.”

Prior to her
termination, Officer Tasca had never generated a single citizen complaint or
official reprimand. She was being considered for promotion before she got in
trouble in April 2011.

What horrible deed led to Officer Tasca's dismissal?

Before
answering that question, it’s worth reviewing a few recent cases of severe
police misconduct that either went entirely unpunished, or resulted in
sanctions short of termination.

Lawrenceville,
Georgia Police Chief Randy Johnson refuses to fire Detective Tim Ashley, an
abusive cop with a nasty habit of imprisoning innocent people – a habit that
has already cost the local taxpayers a great deal in legal expenses. Among his
victims is Ann Jaipersaud, who operates a Chevron station in
Lawrenceville.

When Jaipersaud
found herself dealing with an aggravated customer, she made the common – and by
now inexcusable – mistake of calling the police for help. As is always the
case, matters immediately got much worse after the police
intervened in the dispute.

The customer,
an American of African ancestry, apparently thought that the store owner (a
woman of East Indian descent who was born in Guyana) didn’t want to sell him
gas on account of his ethnic background. When told that the station had no
gasoline, the customer — who verbally abused the store owner — refused to
leave.

Jaipersaud’s
call was answered by five officers, including DetectiveAshley. After the customer claimed that
Jaipersaud had struck him, she pointed out that the store’s security video
would prove that she had done no such thing — but she didn’t know how to access
it. Ashley demanded that she call her son, who was at school.

“He said I need
to get him here now or else,” Jaipersaud recalled. “I asked him if he was
threatening me…. And he said, `No, I’m arresting you.’” The officer later
explained that he arrested Jaipersaud for being “disrespectful.” She spent ten
hours in jail for what was later determined to be a wrongful arrest. A jury
awarded Jaipersaud nearly $140,000 in damages.

Detective Tim Ashley abducts Jaipersaud (right).

Lawrenceville
tax victims will almost certainly forced to indemnify Ashley’s crimes against
29-year-old Mississippi resident Carlos Fairley, who was abducted by police in
a SWAT-style raid and then spent two months behind bars as a result of the
detective’s culpable disregard for evidence.

Last
November, Fairley — who was earning an honest living as a cook at a casino —
tried to obtain a more lucrative position in the plunder-based sector by
applying for a position with the Transportation Security Administration. A
background check by the agency found that Fairley had outstanding arrest
warrants in Lawrenceville for two counts of armed robbery.

At
this point the alert reader will probably ask two questions:

“Wait
— the TSA actually does background checks on applicants? And an
accusation of armed robbery would be considered a disqualification,
rather than an endorsement, for someone seeking to join the TSA’s corps
of molesters and petty thieves?”

In
any case, Fairley was told he had to clear up the warrants before being
considered for employment with the TSA. When he called the Lawrenceville PD to
inform them that he had not so much as visited Georgia for nine years, “Ashley
`loudly and rudely’ said he knew Fairley committed the crime and hung up on
him,” recounts the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The
warrants were issued on the basis of a photo lineup that included a picture of
Fairley when he was booked after being arrested as a teenager roughly a decade
ago for “joyriding” in a stolen vehicle. Furthermore, the eyewitness testimony
described the robber as having a face disfigured by several tattoos; Fairley’s
face is unmarked. This difference should have been obvious even to a specimen like Tim Ashley.

A
few weeks after he contacted Ashley, Fairley was seized in a guns-drawn police
raid in Mississippi and extradited to Georgia, where he was imprisoned for
three months.

Defense attorney Jason Robert Cornell, who represented Carlos,
recalled to Pro Libertate that the young father “was stuck in jail for 2 months
while I desperately tried to prove his innocence. I wasn't entitled to any portion of the investigative file, seeing as he hadn't yet been
indicted. I had to defend the case blind.”

As an out-of-state defendant accused of a violent felony,
Carlos wasn’t going to be granted bond even if is family could afford it,
Carnell observes.

“Fortunately, after
showing the Assistant District Attorney Carlos' banking records, showing that
he had withdrawn $40 from a Biloxi ATM 45 minutes before he was supposed to be
robbing someone in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and pictures of another guy in
Gwinnett County Jail who looked very
similar to Carlos – and who had been arrested for armed robbery -- the ADA
suggested we have the victims identify him in court.”

Carnell rejected that offer, because in-court identification
would have been “highly suggestive and prejudicial to Carlos.” Instead, the
defense “agreed to a photo line-up. I provided the photo of Carlos and the
other guy and Tim Ashley provided a few others. Neither of the two victims
picked Carlos….The ADA then grudgingly told me he was dismissing the warrants without
apology to me or Carlos.”

In addition to having two months of his life stolen from
him, Carlos now bears the all but ineffaceable taint of the fraudulent arrest.

“Carlos lost his job at a Biloxi casino,” Carnell explains. “He
lost his Dodge Charger he had just bought and his name is permanently tarred
due to the way GCIC and NCIC keep criminal records. You will always be able to
find warrants, for armed robbery, with his name on them -- not to mention his
mug shot.”

Ashley, on the other hand, enjoys perfect job security
despite numerous suspensions for misconduct – including a threatening phone
call to his ex-wife’s boyfriend, and refusing to respond to a homicide call while
on duty.

Not
surprisingly, Fairley has filed a lawsuit against Ashley and the department
that employs him. That lawsuit — and the needless abuse of Orlando Fairley —
could have been avoided if Ashley had invested a minimal effort in trying to
identify a legitimate suspect, rather than pursuing what appears to be a
mission to punish Fairley for impudently asserting his innocence.

Regina
Tasca has been responsible for supervising prisoners, but there is no evidence
that she ever imprisoned anyone on false pretenses, or arrested a citizen for
petty or vindictive reasons.

German
Bosque, a Sergeant in the police department terrorizing Opa-Locka, Florida,
has been the subject of 41 internal investigations, more than a dozen of them
in cases involving battery or excessive force. He was found with counterfeit currency, crack
pipes, and cocaine in his police vehicle. On several occasions, Bosque has been
accused of domestic violence, stalking, and stealing a car. One of his
preferred tactics is to “tune up” – that is, assault – youngsters if they
display what he considers “disrespect” toward the police.

Well-compensated thug German Bosque.

Bosque
has been arrested three times. He has also been fired five times -- and
immediately re-instated with the help of the local criminal’s lobby (more
commonly known as the police officers’ union). He is safely ensconced in a
$60,000-a-year job as a state-licensed thug.

Officer
Regina Tasca was never accused of abusing anybody. As noted above, she has
never received a single citizen complaint.

Although
police “could see that the suspect had the baby in his arms” just before Peters
fired the fatal shot, Loxas was unarmed, according to a Scripps wire service
account. “After several calls for Loxas to exit the home, he opened the door
with the baby in his left hand, and stood just inside the doorway…. Officers
then saw Loxas reach down to his right, lowering the baby and exposing his head
and upper body. Peters then responded to the movement with a single shot to
Loxas’ head.”

Two
years ago, Loxas was arrested following a report that Loxas had been seen
“yelling and walking around with a handgun.” Although officers described him as
“drunk” and “threatening his neighbors with a pistol,” he was not charged with
aggravated assault — as Arizona statutes would dictate if that description were
accurate — but for the trivial offense of “disorderly conduct.”

The
Valentine’s Day incident began in similar fashion. The police were summoned by
a report that Loxas had kicked a neighbor’s garbage can into the street while
he was on a walk with his nine-month-old grandson. When police arrived they
found him outside his home. Ordered to “step away” from the house, Loxas
retreated inside. Without any evidence that Loxas intended to harm the child,
the officers created a “crisis entry team” — that is, they escalated the
conflict by imposing a military protocol that led to the summary execution of a
man who wasn’t suspected of a violent crime.

Although
Loxas was treated as if he were a heavily armed barricaded kidnapper, a search
of his home turned up a total of two firearms — neither of which was within
easy reach when he was killed by Officer Peters — and an object described as a
“functional improvised explosive device” that was disposed of by a bomb squad
and not inspected by any independent party.

While
Loxas’s behavior and statements were considered troubling by some, it was Peters
who clearly posed a danger to himself and others. During his 12-year career,
Peters was involved in seven shootings, six of them fatal. His personnel record
is replete with complaints about excessive force, including “dozens” of
episodes involving Tasers. In 2005, he was disciplined for pointing a gun at
his own head.

Peters
left the force following the Loxas shooting – but he wasn’t fired. Instead, he
received an “accidental disability retirement,” which permits him to
collect a full pension. He will probably be able to find employment as a police
officer in another jurisdiction. Regina Tasca, who fought the decision to
terminate her for more than a year, most likely will lose at least some of her
benefits – and, as we will see shortly, she will almost certainly be persona non
grata throughout the “law enforcement community.”

Davis received
a 30-day unpaid suspension, as did fellow Officer Steven Running. Senior
Officer Kenneth Bigger was handed a 20-day suspension. The sternest punishment
– if the term could be applied here – was imposed on Sergeant Paul Terry, who
was suspended for 45 days.

By any rational
standard, embezzling a million dollars is a serious crime. Yet none of the
officers involved in that felonious conspiracy faced criminal charges. None of
them has been required to make restitution. None of them was fired.

Accordingly, it
would be reasonable to expect that Regina Tasca’s firing offense would be more
serious than defrauding Houston’s tax victims out of a million dollars. As it
happens, her offense had nothing to do with corruption of any kind.

According to
Houston PD Spokeswoman Jodi Silva, the shooting was justified because Officer
Martin, who was supposedly “trapped” by Claunch, feared “for his partner’s safety
and his own safety” despite the fact that they were both young, able-bodied,
armed individuals confronting an invalid in a wheelchair who was armed with a
writing utensil.

The killing of
Brian Claunch, which was not Officer Martin’s first shooting, precipitated a
huge public outcry, and the Police Chief has called for a Justice Department
investigation. On previous performance it is all but certain that Martin will
not be prosecuted, nor is it likely that he will suffer injury to his career.

It so happens
that the incident that led to Regina Tasca’s firing offense also involved an
emotionally disturbed and unarmed individual who was perceived as a threat to
officer safety. Did she shoot and kill the subject, or use disproportionate
force in subduing him?

Career-ending nobility: Tasca stops Rella's assault.

No. As the
officer in charge of the situation, Tasca followed the Bogota Police
Department’s use-of-force policy to the
letter by intervening to protect the victim from a criminal assault
committed by an officer from another department.

About two days
after the episode, Tasca was labeled a “danger” to her fellow officers and suspended
by the department. Following a year of disciplinary reviews, psychological
evaluations, and a spurious legal process worthy of the Soviet Union, Tasca was
fired.

Tasca was on
patrol on April 29, 2011 when she got a call for medical assistance. Former
Bogota Council Member Tara Sharp, concerned about the erratic behavior of her
son Kyle, called the police to take him to the hospital for a psychological
evaluation. As noted earlier, requesting police intervention, particularly in
cases of this kind, is never a good idea. Sharp was exceptionally fortunate
that Officer Tasca was the first to respond: She has years of experience as an
EMT and had just completed specialized training on situations involving
psychologically disturbed people.

Once on the
scene, Tasca acted quickly to calm down the distraught young man, whose mood
changed abruptly when he saw the other officers arrive.The official
report on the matter, which was written by retired Judge Richard Donohue,
claims that Kyle “was aggressive [and] started to walk away….” Only someone
incurably inhospitable to both logic and honesty would describe walking away as
“aggressive” behavior. Kyle also instructed the police not to step on his
property, which was a lawful order the police were required to obey. Instead, Sgt.
Chris Thibault tackled Kyle, wrapped him in a bear hug, and attempted to
handcuff him. Within an instant, Sgt. Joe Rella piled on and began to slug Kyle
in the head while his horrified mother screamed at the officers to stop.

According to
Thibault, it was necessary to assault Kyle because he believed “danger is near
for us if we let this kid go.”

Tasca
instinctively did what any legitimate peace officer would do: She intervened to protect the victim,
pulling Rella off the helpless and battered young man. Tasca’s act was one of
instinctive decency, genuine principle, and no small amount of courage. It was
also the action dictated by her department’s use-of-force policy, the first
page of which specifies that it is “the responsibility of law enforcement to
take steps possible to prevent or stop the illegal or inappropriate use of
force by other officers.”

In his report
on the case, Judge Donohue acknowledged that Tasca acted in compliance with the
use-of-force policy – but he dismissed that fact on the preposterous grounds
that “no evidence was presented to establish that Officer Tasca even knew about
the document.”

Only an uncommonly
inventive sophist would pretend that the important question is whether Tasca
was aware of the document stating the policy, rather than whether her actions
were in accord with that policy.

Earlier in the
same month, Tasca had prompted criticism for failing to rush to the aid of her
partner, Officer Jay Fowler, during a brief confrontation with a tiny, drunken
woman at a hospital. The woman, who was not a criminal suspect, was taken to
the hospital for medical attention. She decided to leave, and when Fowler – who
had already surrendered custody to the hospital – tried to stop her, the young woman
“flailed” her arms, inflicting a small scratch on one of Fowler’s hands that
tore open an old scab.

As a result of
this “altercation” with a woman whom he outweighed by about 100 pounds, Fowler spent
a week on paid medical leave, according to Donohue’s report.

“Nobody had said anything to me about the
earlier case until after the incident with the Ridgefield officers,” Tasca
pointed out to me. Her refusal to gang-tackle a tiny, confused woman in a
hospital, coupled with her active intervention to stop a criminal assault on an
unarmed, mentally unbalanced man who was not a criminal suspect, supposedly established
a “pattern” of behavior that made Tasca a danger to her fellow officers.

After being put
on suspension, Tasca was subjected to a psychological evaluation by Dr. Matthew
Geller, a psychiatrist who does contact work for New Jersey law enforcement
agencies. Geller’s assessment reads like something compiled by a State-employed
psychiatrist in the Brezhnev-era Soviet psihuska.
Geller claims that Tasca suffers from something called a “mixed personality
disorder,” displaying “a personality type characterized by a long-standing
pattern of grandiose self-importance and exaggerated sense of talent and
achievement.”

This purported
dysfunction, once again, wasn’t noticed until after Tasca displayed the character and integrity to take the
morally appropriate action – one dictated by the official guidelines of her
department – in defiance of pressure from her peers and superiors to conform.

Tasca, an
openly gay female police officer, believes that at least some of the problems
she’s experienced are the product of a cultural clash with what she describes
as “the Old Boys Club.” Judge Donohue’s report mentions two instances in which she was criticized by for not extending
what is euphemistically called “professional courtesy” by writing traffic
citations against another officer.

Despite such
frictions, Tasca’s job appeared secure – until the moment she behaved like a peace officer, rather than a law enforcer, and crossed the “Blue Line” by
coming to the defense of Kyle Sharp.

Fidelity to the tribal interests of the
punitive priesthood will cover a multitude of crimes, but taking the side of a
Mundane being attacked by a member of the Brotherhood is an unpardonable
offense.